Customs agents at the Rafik Hariri International Airport thwarted on Wednesday an attempt to smuggle drugs to Saudi Arabia, reported the National News Agency.

It said that agents became suspicious of cardboard boxes being sent to Riyadh and upon inspection they discovered over 500,000 captagon pills concealed in them.

A Saudi court has jailed an al-Qaida-linked jihadist for 16 years for plotting to kill the kingdom's grand mufti, Sheikh Abdul Aziz bin Abdullah al-Sheikh, and other clerics, media said Wednesday.

The sentence, which includes 40 lashes and a 16-year travel ban, was handed down on Tuesday by a court in Riyadh specializing in terrorism cases, the local Okaz daily reported.

Head of the Loyalty to the Resistance bloc MP Mohammed Raad stressed on Tuesday that Hizbullah chief Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah has clear evidence that Saudi Arabia was behind the November 19 bombing near the Iranian embassy in Beirut.

He said after holding talks with former President Emile Lahoud that “President Michel Suleiman was quick in responding to Nasrallah” and defending Saudi Arabia.

Pentagon chief Chuck Hagel reaffirmed U.S. military ties with Qatar on Tuesday, during a regional tour aimed at shoring up Gulf alliances amid disagreements over policy on Iran and Syria.

Hagel met Qatar's Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani and his minister of state for defense, Major General Hamad bin Ali al-Attiyah, in Doha, following stops in Saudi Arabia on Monday and Bahrain last week.

Saudi authorities on Tuesday beheaded a man convicted of incest in the south of the conservative Muslim kingdom, the interior ministry said.

Hasan Ghazwani, a Saudi national, was executed in the city of Jizan, the ministry said in a statement carried by SPA state news agency.

Syria's government has called on the United Nations to make efforts to stop what it says is Saudi Arabia's support for extremist Islamist groups fighting to topple the regime.

"We call on the U.N. Security Council to take the necessary measures to put an end to the unprecedented actions of the Saudi regime, which is supporting takfiri (Sunni extremist) terrorism tied to al-Qaida," Syria's foreign ministry said in a message.

With its decades-old U.S. alliance strained over the Syria war and a nuclear deal with Iran, Saudi Arabia is calling on the Gulf monarchies to unite for their own self-defense.

U.S. Pentagon chief Chuck Hagel, visiting Saudi Arabia on Monday, has assured Gulf states that the agreement struck between major powers and Iran on November 24 will not affect the presence of some 35,000 U.S. troops in the region.

Saudi Arabia has launched a genetic code mapping project aimed at identifying the basis of chronic diseases prevalent in the desert kingdom.

The Saudi Human Genome Program will be run by Saudi researchers, in cooperation with the U.S. Life Technologies Corporation, at the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST).

Saudi Ambassador Ali Awadh Asiri shrugged off the criticism against Riyadh over its stances from the region's turmoil, and praised President Michel Suleiman over his keenness on Lebanon's relations with Arab countries.

Suleiman's stances “come out of his keenness on Lebanon's historic ties with its Arab neighbors and Saudi Arabia,” Asiri said.

Gulf Cooperation Council states must be part of the negotiations between major world powers and Iran, oil-rich Saudi Arabia's former intelligence chief said on Sunday.

Iran and major powers broke through a decade of gridlock on November 24 to agree an interim deal that would freeze parts of Iran's controversial nuclear program while easing some of the crippling international sanctions against it.